ADI Lunch Lecture - Ayo Wahlberg

The next lunch lecture is by Ayo Wahlberg, Postdoc, Dept. of Anthropology. The title of the lecture is "Family secrets and the industrialisation of herbal medicine in Viet Nam".

Abstract

In 1955, the Vietnamese government launched a national programme to ‘resuscitate traditional medicine' which continues to this day. This has included botanical expeditions to collect and record medicinal plant species as identified by various village practitioners, efforts to modernise valuable traditional remedies and regulatory initiatives to integrate traditional medicine into the national health delivery system. This paper maps out the industrialisation route followed by one particular traditional herbal remedy in the 1990s as herbalists, chemists, pharmacologists and clinicians collaborated to, on the one hand, standardise its production through phytochemical analysis, and on the other, demonstrate its efficacy through clinical trials. In doing so, it is shown how tensions between superstition and reason, quackery and competence as well as the natural and the toxic disarm classic East/West and modern/traditional dichotomies.

The ADI lunch lectures take place once a month
at NIAS and are open lectures on an Asia related topic. The idea is to give a taste of the wide
range of Asia related research going on at the University of Copenhagen
and to open up for future interdisciplinary and interregional research
collaborations.

Future lectures

Date

Lecturer

Title

21.Apr.

Søren Ivarsson, Associate Prof., SAXO Institute

Policepower and the formation of the modern Thai state: The Thai Provincial Gendarmerie and its Danish Officers, 1897-1926